Landing Porzingis is the Mavs’ cure for the future

A few hours before the NBA Draft, Mavericks owner/CNN pundit Mark Cuban will take a sledgehammer to start the process of rebuilding his team’s locker room; please, Lord, let this ceremonial swing of destruction not be a foreshadow to his latest off-season venture.

As the NBA draft is here and NBA free agency looms, we know that Cuban’s plan to maintain his toy as title contenders was a series of miscalculated swings that had a jackhammer effect on the Mavericks.

The good news, despite the best efforts of our wunderkind basketball savant owner, is that not even our Mavericks have botched building an NBA team more than the New York Knicks.

Whatever criticisms we have reserved for the Mavericks and their rebuilding of a championship roster around Dirk Nowitzki, no NBA team has been quite as magically inept as the Knicks.

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Do the Mavericks’ have enough to acquire Porzingis from the perpetually-rebuilding Knicks?

It will require dealing the ninth overall pick, guard Wesley Matthews (go ahead), and at least an additional first-rounder. Every other Maverick should be available, including Dirk, Cuban and picking up that terrible contract of Knicks forward Joakim Noah, too.

Porzingis is 7-foot-3 and can play. He doesn’t have Dirk’s outside shot, but ... who does?

When Phil Jackson made Porzingis the fourth overall pick in the 2015 NBA draft, the selection was roundly ripped. The fear was he was too skinny, and too European, to help the Knicks anytime soon, if at all.

Similar knocks were said when the Mavericks acquired Dirk from the Milwaukee Bucks in a draft-deal deal in 1998.

Parsons wisely befriended Cuban, signed for too much money with the Mavericks, and then over-promised that he and his agent could deliver top free agents, like Jordan. Parsons had trouble staying healthy, never did help sign a free agent, and left pouting because his BFF Cuban would not over-pay again whereas Memphis did.

Jordan famously said yes, but then decided to remain with the Clippers, who are now reportedly shopping him to the Suns.

Matthews? Hooray! He said yes, and thus far he’s been what he was in Portland — decent.

Whiteside was never coming to the Mavericks.

All of these misses crippled what had been one of the best franchises in the NBA for the first 15 years of this century, and left Dirk without competent friends at the end of his career.

It has led the Mavericks to the ninth overall pick in the draft on Thursday night, and a franchise that is reluctantly accepting the only way it will be good again is through the draft.

It’s a sound plan, unless the Knicks are just that dumb and are serious about dealing Porzingis.